No abstract

Parents experience difficulty helping their children with math at home. Math teachers can provide guidance or materials to parents. Little is known about whether this help from math teachers has benefits for parental support at home and thus contributes to students' academic development in math. The current study examines longitudinal associations between parents' perceived support from math teachers, parental academic support at home (reported from parents and students), and changes in students' intrinsic motivation and anxiety in math. Data stem from ninth and tenth graders (Mage = 14.49, SD = 0.93, 13 public schools, 56.5% girls) and their parents (N = 157 parent–child dyads). The latent structural equation model demonstrated no association between parents' perceived support from math teachers and their academic support at home. Parents' reported academic support at home was cross‐sectionally and positively related to students' perceived parental academic support at home and students' intrinsic motivation. In addition, students' perceived parental academic support at home was associated with positive change in students' intrinsic motivation over the academic year. Furthermore, higher student intrinsic motivation leads to a decrease in their anxiety in math over the academic year.

The family plays an important role in adolescents’ social development. Yet there is little information about the impact of family climate on adolescents’ social adaptation, and the term “family climate” is seldom clearly defined and is usually related to other concepts, such as family systems or family environments. To understand the core of family climate, this study conducted a systematic review to analyze research about family climate associated with adolescents’ social adaptation in community samples. A search of empirical research published over the last 20 years identified 12 relevant studies. The studies revealed that family climate can mainly be described in terms of cohesion, conflict, organization, adaptability, and expressiveness. Family climate was shown to be a good predictor of both problem-solving skills and violence in relationships and exhibited further associations with other aspects of social adaptation. This review revealed a need for more systematic and longitudinal research on family climate in community samples.

With the rapid progress of technological development, self-efficacy in reference to digital devices (i.e., information and computer technology [ICT] self-efficacy) is an important driver that helps students to deal with technological problems and support their lifelong learning processes. Schools, peers, and home learning environments are important sources for the development of positive self-efficacy. Expanding on previous research, we investigated the associations between different aspects of the digital home learning environment and students’ ICT self-efficacy. The moderation effects of gender were also tested. A total of 651 children answered a questionnaire about different digital home learning environment dimensions and estimated their ICT self-efficacy using an adapted scale—Schwarzer and Jerusalem’s (1999) general self-efficacy scale. Using the structural equation modeling technique, a digital home learning environment containing six different qualities of parental support was investigated. Families’ cultural capital, parents’ attitudes toward the Internet, and shared Internet activities at home contributed positively to ICT self-efficacy. We observed small gender differences, with the moderation effect being nonsignificant. The results help researchers and practitioners to understand how different dimensions of the digital home learning environment support ICT self-efficacy. We will discuss how parents can enhance the home learning environment and how teachers can integrate this knowledge into formal education.

Family-Literacy-Programme stellen eine gute Möglichkeit dar, Eltern in Bildungsprozesse einzubeziehen. Am Beispiel des Programms „LIFE – Lesen in Familie erleben“ wird die Wirkung auf elterliche Unterstützung beim Lesenlernen von Erstklässler*innen unter Einbezug von Eltern- und Kinderperspektive untersucht. Sowohl direkt nach dem Programm als auch ein halbes Jahr später wirkte das Programm positiv auf verschiedene Arten der Anschlusskommunikation beim gemeinsamen Lesen.